By LEONARD GRAY

GARYVILLE – With mothers’ love and constant prayers, hope resides on Little Hope Street, home of a thousand heartbreaks.

On any given week, people who live on the narrow street in Garyville end up jailed for offenses, usually drug-related. Commander Octavio Gonzalez, commander of the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff’s Office narcotics division, said the street is home to some of the worst drug trafficking in the parish.

Residents regularly complain about children and teen-agers walking the streets at all hours, burglaries, fires and violence. The parish curfew is 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. for children under age 17, but few seem to notice.

Yet, Little Hope Street was once a street of dreams.

The name derives from Hope Plantation, one of a number of plantations which once lined the Great River Road through the River Parishes, and built in 1857. The town of Garyville, a lumber mill town which enjoyed great prosperity in the 1910s and 1920s, was built on the sites of the old Emalie, Glencoe and Hope plantations. Hope Plantation is still on River Road, a private residence.

At that time, from Garyville’s founding 100 years ago until lumber from the cypress trees ran out, the town was the largest between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, with hotels, theaters, banks, dance hall and baseball fields; railroad station, swimming pools, drug stores and ice-cream parlors; gymnasium, bakery, barber shops and an automobile dealership.

Many of Garyville’s dreams ended, though, with the mill fires of 1926 and 1928. After that second fire, which destroyed 37 homes, the town’s troubles accelerated.

In August 1931, the Lyon Cypress Lumber Company pulled up stakes after processing millions of board feet of cypress timber and left town. Walter Stebbins continued to operate a lumber and salvage company, but the heart had gone out of the town.

Hopeful residents

Lester and Joann Dunn came to Garyville in 1957, still filled with hopes and dreams to raise a family and see their children grow straight and moral.

“It was very nice when we first moved here,” Joann recalled.

The couple’s daughter, Karen was born in 1963. Lester Jr. came along in 1965, James in 1966 and Leslie rounded out the family in 1972. The children grew and time passed.

However, as the 1960s became the 1970s, the urban drug scene began to trickle into the communities surrounding New Orleans. With it came the violence.

Lester Jr., who currently lives in Washington, had some trouble but escaped it all by joining the U.S. Army. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering technology and recently built a new house.

Second son, James, seemed to veer off the tracks, his parents said.

First, there were the people he hung with. On street corners, late at night. The dope. The fights.

Then came the killing of Sheriff’s Detective Lt. Sherman Ray Walker.

James Dunn was one of three people who ambushed and gunned down Walker outside the detective’s home on Nov. 6, 1984. Dunn pled guilty in August 1985 to manslaughter and received a 22-year sentence. He was released on good behavior in 1995, but three years later, he was in trouble again.

In that same case, Willie Rogers pled guilty to first-degree murder and received a life sentence and Wilfred Greenup pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

Then Lester Sr. died in 1987.

Joann Dunn’s eyes reddened as the tears threatened her self-control. She stopped talking. She remembered the words of her friend, Sister Geraldine, at nearby St. Hubert Catholic Church – to let Jesus take the pain.

“No more I can do. It’s in God’s hands now. I raised my children well, but it’s the company you keep,” she said.

Meanwhile, the girls thrived. Karen earned a college degree and got married. Now, she owns a florist business in LaPlace. Leslie, with her associate degree in fashion marketing, maintains a full-time job and stays with her mother.

Residents strive

for better lives

Up the street, at the corner with River Road, Haiti native Raymond Jean Batiste and his wife, Carolyn, work daily at their grocery and restaurant which he has operated for 12 years.

“It’s a better life here,” he said. “If there’s a problem outside, I go tell them to cut it out. If you come in here, you got to be straight.”

Carolyn added, “When I see them with their pants half down, I say pull them up before you come in here.”

His posted rule includes not allowing anyone to bring any alcohol inside his business. That does not prevent parents from buying cigarettes and beer and handing it to their own children, waiting by the door.

“I’ve seen mamas come in here and buy cigars and hand it to kids outside to make a blunt,” Carolyn said.

A “blunt” is a cigar with some of the tobacco removed and marijuana stuffed inside.

“They need a curfew out here,” he said. There is one – 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Nobody seems to notice or care.

The problem with Little Hope Street, they agree, is a lack of parents willing to exercise discipline with their children.

“I’ve seen too many little ones out in the middle of the night,” Carolyn said with a shake of her head. “Late at night, the kids are walking up and down the street.”

One man she knows went to court over custody of his child. The mother said the child was doing well.

“How can he be doing well if he don’t go to school?” the man asked.

And the saddest part is the children want acceptance and respect.

“If you’re going to hang with them, they won’t respect you,” Raymond warns children of the criminal element.

The couple was robbed once by a 15-year-old boy who used a gun he had stolen the day before. Their own gun.

Is Garyville getting better? “It’s a bad neighborhood, trying to get better,” Carolyn said.

She attends True Light Baptist Church, right up the street.

“They’ve got all kinds of programs for youth, but they won’t go. Parents won’t send them to Sunday school,” she said.

The answer, she insisted, is loving discipline.

“A lot don’t respect their parents,” Carolyn pointed out and said of controlling children, “You’ve got to start out young.”

It has helped in her case. One of her own children, from a previous marriage, is Walter Stevens. He did all right. He is a detective-lieutenant with the sheriff’s office.

Like a lot of folks nowadays, she is helping raise a grandchild and she worries about the child’s future.

“I’ve been in Garyville all my life,” she said. “You can’t rely on this generation here.”

Preaching responsibility

The Rev. Charles Caluda has seen much of the problems in Garyville, especially the slide downward in moral values. He is the pastor at St. Hubert Catholic Church.

“I’ve been here 27 years, altogether,” he said.

He is likewise concerned about the drug scene, where the trafficking goes on, even right outside his rectory.

“It’s very discouraging,” he said. “It’s institutionalized here.”

When he first came to the area in 1971 for a short stint, drugs were just beginning to affect the community. Now, he sees drugs and immorality as “plagues on the black community.”

“No doubt, drugs are at the center of their predicament,” he said.

But it all comes down to choices made. People can choose to embrace strong family values, a vigorous faith and a good work-ethic. Or, they can descend into darkness.

Caluda contrasts the black community with the Vietnamese community. Refugees who came to America from a war-torn country, they band together, work hard, earn their way and, generally, are succeeding in the American community. It has not taken long.

“How long can you blame slavery?” he asked. Instead, blacks have taken on the face of crime. “It’s impossible to look at a black face and not think crime.”

Still, the residents come to him for help. He can offer spiritual comfort, but little else for now.

There are plans for a new community center aimed at focusing on problems in the black community, though there are few black parishioners. There are plans for the old Garyville Grammar School for an outreach program and summer classes, working with the St. John Parish School System.

“It’s a very limited beginning, but it’s a beginning,” he said.

At the heart of it, though, is that people have to be willing to get and use help. “it’s not impossible. The individual has to make a choice.”

The wrong crowd

Joann Dunn still worries about James, three years on Death Row now.

It began not long after he got out of prison in 1995. Again, he started with the wrong crowd, all from Little Hope Street.

There came a time when he had no job, and a car note to pay. Some “friends” said they could rob this bank, and it was “easy money.” No problem.

Dunn was joined in the crime by Anthony Scott and Kendall Breaux, both now 23 and both from Little Hope Street in Garyville.

Dunn, now 36, was convicted March 18, 2002, of shooting Jackie Blanchard, 31, of Plattenville, and Lisa Dupuis, 22, of Pierre Part, during the armed robbery of the Napoleonville branch of Iberville Savings & Trust Bank on June 4, 1998.

The trial began on March 15 and four days later the jury returned a decision that Dunn should die by lethal injection.

The bank robbery and murder began when, at 11:45 a.m. on June 4, 1998, the three men entered the bank, located on Louisiana Highway 1. When it was all over, two tellers were mortally wounded. According to prosecutors, Scott first shot Blanchard in the head with a .41-caliber Magnum firing .38-caliber slugs.

Then, the prosecutor added, Dunn shot Dupuis three times and delivered a killing shot to Blanchard.

His mother firmly believes her son did not shoot anyone. Dunn’s attorney, Robert Pastor, argued Dunn did not do the shooting, but only drove the getaway vehicle.

An Assumption Parish sheriff’s deputy, responding to a silent alarm from the bank, arrived in time to spot the fleeing vehicle containing Dunn, Scott and Breaux. He gave chase while broadcasting a description of the rented 1988 Pontiac Sunbird.

Roadblocks were set up in their path near Donaldsonville, as it appeared the trio were headed for the Sunshine Bridge. They stopped at the roadblock but, when asked for identification, they sped away.

One mile down the road, at 1 p.m., the car was struck by a Union Pacific train. Breaux was pinned in the vehicle and quickly apprehended. The other two, Dunn and Scott, were trying to run into a nearby sugarcane field near C.F. Industries. They were quickly caught.

Inside the vehicle, the robbery loot and the bank’s security camera containing the robbery caught on videotape were recovered.

Falterman explained that the camera was not what people expect of a running videotape. It was actually still shots, taken every 15 seconds, which recorded the crime.

The district attorney added, though, that it showed Dunn gunning down the two tellers. Afterward, the trio splashed gasoline around inside the bank, in an attempt to burn it down and further conceal evidence. However, the gasoline failed to ignite.

Joann Dunn said she believes her son was trying to kill himself while he tried to escape, not wanting to go back to prison. He could see the train approaching across the sugarcane field and he drove into it on purpose.

“That was a good boy,” she insisted. “Still is.”

She lives on Little Hope Street, surrounded by younger neighbors with their increasingly rambunchous children.

“They break the street lights,” she said. “They try to break into people’s houses. They try to break into my house. My youngest daughter, they stole her puppy and beat it to death. They set fires to trailers.”

She watches TV late at night and hears children out on the street and she fights back the tears.